There were years when I went to the movies almost every day – around the time of my adolescence. Those were years in which cinema was my world.

What flavor of a society and an era was in the air around these conventional plots mattered little – but precisely for this reason it reached me without me knowing how to define what it consisted of. It was (as I’d later learn) the misrepresentation of what that society carried inside but it was a particular misrepresentation – different from our misrepresentation which engulfed us during the rest of the day.

And like how for a psychoanalyst it doesn’t matter if the patient lies or tells the truth because it reveals something to him either way – as part of another system of misrepresentation I the spectator had something to learn both from that little bit of truth and from that whole lot of misrepresentation that the Hollywood products were giving me.

Therefore I don’t harbor any hard feelings about that false image of life; now it seems to me that I never took it as true but only for one among the possible artificial images – even if then I wouldn’t have known how to explain it.

Unlike French cinema American cinema didn’t have anything to do with literature at the time: perhaps this is the reason why in my experience it stands out from the rest in an isolated prominence: these memories of mine as a spectator are part of the memories from before literature reached me.

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Ever wonder what movie everyone was settling down to watch the day your mother forced you kicking and screaming into this world? Probably not, but it’s kind of interesting to find out nonetheless.

Playback.fm has set up a tool that allows you to input your birth date before scraping the charts and finding the name of the film that was top of the US box office – the price of admission for it and the trailer.